


Politics is Like Music, It Gives You a Voice

by riverlight



Category: Bandom, Cobra Starship, Fall Out Boy, Hush Sound, My Chemical Romance, Panic At The Disco
Genre: Alternate Universe, American Politics, Gen, Political Campaigns, Politics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-03-28
Updated: 2008-03-28
Packaged: 2017-10-26 17:52:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/286202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/riverlight/pseuds/riverlight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So I was walking from the Metro to work, thinking about bandom, like you do, and it was the normal morning rush on K Street, with the dudes at Farragut selling flowers and a homeless man hawking newspapers, that one Chinese musician just getting his gear set up, men in suits clutching their copies of Politico and their Blackberries and trendy women in skirts and sneakers ducking into Firehook for coffee. And I was thinking, god, what we really need is a good political AU!</p><p>And I don't know the K Street world or the Capitol Hill world well enough, really, do those justice, but man, could I ever do the campaign trail AU. Here's what might happen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Politics is Like Music, It Gives You a Voice

**Author's Note:**

> This isn't _fic,_ really, so much as the extended plotting-out of what a fic might have looked like, if I'd ever written a political campaign AU. Since I'm no longer in bandom, really, I doubt I'll ever write it, so up here this goes. :)
> 
> (Not that this is based in real life, or anything...*g*)

Pete would be the one who quits his job and piles his stuff in his car and sets out cross-country to New Hampshire without even telling anyone. He doesn't even call beforehand, just shows up, and the campaign's still getting started, just a bunch of crazy believers operating out of someone's aunt's guesthouse or something, so they put him to work knocking on doors and calling up voters. And about a week in two things happen: one, they figure out Pete's wasted on that sort of work, and make him regional director of the Manchester office, and two, suddenly the candidate starts making waves, and they're suddenly playing in the big time, baby.

So they move into this big warehouse space, and they're getting momentum, so there are more people trickling in every day, and they set up slabs of plywood on sawhorses to use as desks and put in some old computers and set up a real field staff. Patrick shows up one day pretty early on; he'd been following the candidate in the blogs, and when he didn't know anyone else local who was supporting the Senator, he set up a website to link people together, and it got pretty huge pretty quickly and caught the attention of the campaign. They offered him what was really a pretty crappy salary and the opportunity to sleep on someone's couch, but he's pretty into this candidate so that doesn't even matter, and now here he is in Manchester. Pretty soon he's the resident technical genius, setting up a network of these sites to link up supporters and getting people involved in blogs. He and Pete meet and Pete thinks Patrick's kind of weird at first, this shy kid who always wears trucker hats and never talks and is frankly a pretty big geek, but then Patrick starts building this great voter file that is like a field staffer's _dream,_ and he and Pete start to work together and Pete figures out that he may be shy but he's a pretty awesome dude, and they get to be pretty good friends.

They're working hard, but it's still early days, though, easy summer days when the campaigns still have time to play softball against each other in the evenings up at the school ballfield, and the staffers have time to go out for drinks after knocking off for the day. Joe shows up one day as a random volunteer and he's so easy and mellow everyone likes him; they put him to work as a volunteer coordinator and pretty soon he's got this huge network of folks who come in to make phone calls and do data entry, and he's able to sweet-talk all the little old ladies into bringing homemade cookies for the other volunteers and get the laconic guy who owns the gas station to come in after the game on Wednesdays with a pot of totally wicked chili (and some beer for the staffers, which they drink after hours in the office with the lights off).

Andy's another one of the ones who've been there since the beginning; he got into journalism because he's pretty cynical about the current political system and liked the idea of influencing the national discussion and framing political debate. Even though he's sort of against the idea of institutionalized education, he went off and got halfway through his journalism major at UChicago before taking a year off to work on a local campaign full-time as press secretary; that was a few years ago, and he's been bouncing from campaign to campaign ever since, and now he's deputy press secretary for the Senator's NH campaign (a pretty good step up, even though at the time he hired on it was a long-shot bet). All the interns find him sort of intimidating, because he's this totally cool guy with tattoos up and down his arms (he has to wear dark button-downs any time he appears on camera) and it's rumored that he played the drums with a bunch of pretty popular bands back in the day in Chicago. Also? he's pretty stunningly good at his job, _and_ he's incredibly hot. All the volunteers (and not a few of the staff) want to sleep with him.

Andy, because he's an actual fairly-high-level staffer, gets paid enough that he goes out and rents an old house across the river with Pete and bunch of other campaign folks (not like they're paying him huge amounts, but it's better than the field staffers are getting). Eventually Joe moves in too, basically sleeping on an air mattress in the corner of the living room, and it becomes sort of the central place to hang out for the staffers. Gabe, who's come up from New York and gets roped into doing minority outreach strictly on the basis of his Spanish ability and not because of any political skill, names the house "The Basement," for some reason, and the name sticks. The Basement's where they have the best parties; there's practically no furniture, just a couple of ratty old couches they dragged in from the curb somewhere and a rickety card table in the kitchen, but Patrick sets up some good speakers he got from somewhere and he can always be reliably counted upon to set up a great party mix on his iPod, so between that and the cheap beer that's all they can afford on campaign salaries, they have a pretty good time.

The week of July 4, they've been working pretty hard for the past few weeks, and everyone's looking forward to the long weekend—the Senator's going to be in town to do a few small events, of course, some photo shoots, but mostly they're going to take it easy, let people have their weekend. And ten- and twelve-hour days are fine, they're campaigners, this is what they signed up for, but—man, they're ready for a little downtime, themselves. Except a few days before the 4th, Mikey, this local kid who's been volunteering in the Manch office, happens to mention the big parade that's traditional in one of the smaller towns upstate. Mikey's a quiet dude, not much for talking, but he's pretty damn smart, politically; he's one of those local kids who's seen campaigns come and go every four years and can work a phone bank in his sleep. (Pete later ends up hiring him.) He's not at all fazed by any of minutiae of local politics; he's been heard to lecture volunteers about the proper pronunciation of Concord ("It's not an airplane, say it like that again and I'll kick your ass") and finds nothing strange about the idea that the town dump on Saturday mornings really is an important place for the candidate to make an appearance. 

  


  


  


So when Mikey offhandedly mentions this parade, with this tone in his voice like, _wait, what, you guys didn't know about this?_ they're all silent for a moment, and then Bob glances over at Pete and raises one eyebrow.  Pete, who'd just finished describing, in loving detail, what he's going to do on his day (all right, half-day, evening, whatever) off, trips over himself to say that hey, of _course_ they're going to be building a parade float if that's what Bob wants? And Bob just nods. (Bob is the State Director, the top boss, the big kahuna. He's this total hard-ass; he came up in the Chicago political scene, and isn't a stranger to bare-knuckle politics. However, maybe because of this, he's also got this really passionate belief in the power of grassroots politics, and he's set up this strategy for New Hampshire that's closer to the politics of union organizing than anything he learned in the back rooms of a Chicago pub, designed to bring people together and rely on their personal connections to build support for the candidate. Anyway, Bob—even though he actually is pretty likable, and has this great laugh if you can crack his tough shell—is also pretty intimidating, so when Bob says jump, Pete, and everyone else, jumps.) 

  


  


  


They stay up late building the parade float; it's a sweet summer evening, cicadas whirring in the bushes and a big moon hanging heavy in the sky. They've thrown open the windows to the office and Patrick's cranked up the music inside, and they're all a little warm and mellow and feeling good. Jon, this young guy they've just hired to work in the bedroom communities north of Boston, happens to be around, and it turns out he's pretty handy with power tools; it also turns out that Mikey is totally _not,_ and should in fact not be allowed near anything electric and sharp ever. So finally Jon and Pete and Joe and Nate and Gabe clamber around the wooden shell of the float, and Mikey sits on the stoop with his brother Gerard who showed up to pick him up since it was late and ended up hanging around, the two of them shoulder-to-shoulder, smoking and kibbitzing. Gerard, it turns out, is an art school graduate, and he comes up with all these ideas for decorating the thing. (Gerard is also the guy whose couch Patrick is crashing on; Mikey had tried to get him involved in the campaign, but Gerard didn't want to, he's not a political person, he's an _artist,_ _Mikey,_ but Mikey's a stubborn bastard, so Gerard finally says, okay, fine, he won't come make phone calls, but there's gotta be some young kid who needs a place to stay. Patrick doesn't mind it; Gerard's actually totally easy-going, and a pretty big slob so he doesn't mind that Patrick is sometimes so exhausted he drops his clothes on the floor and falls into bed and doesn't get around to picking them up; also, his partner, Frankie, who's a teacher in the local private school, is a guitarist, it turns out, and he and Patrick spend hours talking about Robert Johnson and Brian May.) 

  


  


  


Anyway, the next day they all dress up in campaign tee-shirts and buttons and hats, and Greta, the office manager (another one of these local kids who's been doing politics as long as she's been alive; she's young but incredibly savvy, and keeps the whole office running like a dream) brings along some face paint and dabs glittery designs on everyone. She's totally cute, and everyone loves her; half of them want to sleep with her and the other half think of her as a younger sister; either way, even the guys let her do it, because she totally charms them into it. And the parade ends up being a success, and they get a lot of goodwill for participating.

  


  


  


Ray is this musician buddy of theirs who they get to do a bunch of fundraisers (just as a favor, he's not really political, except then he really ends up feeling like hey, maybe he's got a voice in politics again, and he starts organizing local meetups at the cafe across the street from his office.


End file.
